This invention relates to a bath for electroplating gold alloys and more particularly to a bath for the high speed plating of a hardened gold alloy.
It is known to co-deposit various metals with gold during electrodeposition to give a harder electrodeposit than is achievable with pure gold. It is usual for a complexing agent for the alloying metal to be present and in a known gold-cobalt plating bath, citrate is present as a complexing agent and as a buffering agent for the bath.
It might be expected that a bath for the electrodeposition of a gold-nickel alloy might be derivable from a bath for the electrodeposition of a gold-cobalt alloy merely by replacing the source of cobalt with a source of nickel. However, if this is tried, it is found that the plating speed is impaired and that unwanted precipitates are obtained in the bath.